OBITUARIES

Writing your own obituary is not an uncommon concept. There are agencies which will help you do this for a fee. This strikes me as an indicator of how out of touch people can be with who they are. If you are intelligent enough to consider this form of preparation for the inevitable, I would speculate that you would have the basic literary skills to write a few honest lines about your life. So why would you need an editor? The answer is likely a matter of appearances.

I see the writing of an obituary for yourself or a loved one who is alive as an insight-provoking exercise. Mind you, I am speaking of a mentally written or scribbled obituary, open to edits, which is simply an exercise, not a draft for a granite slab. That would be an epitaph anyway. Another useful exercise. One of my favorite epitaphs from a local cemetery: "Here lies ( name ). She tried."

Daring to write your own obituary is an attempt to grasp the cold handle of your own demise. It isn't as easy as you might think, if you promise yourself to be truthful. It does offer the promise of opening your mind to things about your life you may still address before the inevitable. In other words, thinking of how your obituary might live up to your ideal of what it might be could lead you in the right direction to create positive change in your daily life. 

This exercise is best kept a private matter until you feel confident in what you have produced. Then you could share it with a trusted friend. Or, you and a trusted friend could agree to share the exercise from the beginning. Each of you can write your own obituary, and you could then write an obituary for one another. Sharing these in a safe environment has great potential for intimacy and self-discovery. You may have to pass through a giggling stage of farcical versions to get down to the truthful parts, but the whole experience will change you both, I guarantee.

People close to me have died. In each case, I have thought about how I would summarize the life I had known. The closer the person to me, the harder it has been to narrow down the essence of what I would say about that person. My attempt to mentally construct an obituary would spin off into tangents of memories and unresolved feelings. If I stuck with it, I would eventually construct a kernel of what that life meant to me. Those final sketches were most often positive, even in cases where I had been in conflict with the person or had been out of touch for decades. 

I know this all seems morbid to some readers. Fair enough. I have had my time in life where it seemed so much easier to cram for finals rather than do routine preparation for them. But, if your life allows for some time for this simple exercise, instead of watching something on TV, try it. After all, it certainly won't kill you.